Wiktionary:Votes/2016-02/Removing "Quotations"

Voting on:

Proposal 1:

• Allowing all entries to be edited by bot, to remove the "Quotations" section when the only purpose of the section is linking to pages in the Citations: namespace.

Example (proposal 1):

Rationale (proposal 1):

• This is a duplication of the link to the citations namespace that is found at the top of all entries.

Proposal 2:

• Allowing all entries to be edited by bot, to remove the "Quotations" section when it has actual quotations in it, with the requirement that all affected quotations shall either be moved the respective Citations: pages, or moved manually to the appropriate senses in the entries.

Rationale (proposal 2):

• Quotations are more helpful when found under the respective senses. A bot is most certainly unable to arrange quotations in the right senses, but it can move the quotations to the Citations: page, where they can either be kept without that arrangement, or be manually sorted into senses later.

Schedule:

• Vote starts: 00:00, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Vote extended to: 23:59, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

• Vote created: --Daniel Carrero (talk) 04:54, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
• Discussion:

  Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2016/February#Proposal: Removing Quotations header

  Wiktionary talk:Votes/2016-02/Removing "Quotations"

1. Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:46, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
2. Support. Place the "see Cites" links under the relevant senses. - -sche (discuss) 18:17, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
3. Support. --WikiTiki89 20:43, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
4. Support --Vahag (talk) 21:49, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
5. Support --Makaokalani (talk) 12:04, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

   Weak support per -sche. We should heed This, that and the other's warnings about this proposal's impact on mobile-device users. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:50, 20 February 2016 (UTC) — I've changed my vote to one in opposition. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:32, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

6. Support DTLHS (talk) 16:29, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
7. Support Andrew Sheedy (talk) 06:12, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
8. Support Jberkel (talk) 10:26, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
9. Weak support. I agree with everything M.E.T.A. said. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 18:48, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

   Support Andrew Krizhanovsky (talk) 10:31, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

   @AKA MBG: I'm striking your late vote. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 10:41, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

1. Oppose There are many of reasons why this is not a good idea:

   • When using the Wiktionary mobile website and Wiktionary app, there is no way to get to the Citations page from an entry other than to use the link in the Quotations section. By removing this link, people who use Wiktionary in these ways (there might well be more than you think) will no longer be able to reach the Citations page (short of constructing the URL manually, which is an unreasonable thing to expect of all but seasoned participants in the project).
   • The tab bar along the top of the page mostly contains tabs of interest to contributors: "Discussion", "Edit", "History", "Move"... The one exception to this is the "Citations" tab. Its inconspicuous location among otherwise irrelevant interface elements reduces the chance of a casual reader noticing it to practically nil.
   • The "Citations" tab along the top of pages is inserted using JavaScript. Users who do not use a JavaScript-enabled browser, which includes various kinds of basic mobile devices, will not see that tab. Although browsing without JavaScript might make it less pleasant to browse Wiktionary, we should not effectively deny non-JavaScript users access to some of our content.

   Unless these issues are resolved, I cannot support this proposal. Citations are often a very interesting and rich aspect of this project, and they need to be made as accessible as possible, rather than being hidden away behind an obscure tab that many of our readers don't even have access to on their device. This, that and the other (talk) 11:08, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

   @User:This, that and the other: Can you please clarify why placing the "see Cites" links under the relevant senses does not address your concerns? I can't offhand find an example entry but I have seen a link added below quotations under a sense, a link pointing to the citations tab. @User:-sche: Do you know of an example entry to point to? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:39, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

   Well, I don't think you're quite asking the right question. Placing the "see Cites" links under the relevant senses (of course, using a better wording than literally "see Cites") would go a long way to addressing my concerns, but that's not what we are voting on here. This, that and the other (talk) 12:53, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

   @User:This, that and the other: I think the idea of this vote is to have all quotation-related data directly under senses. The Quotations heading is a remnant from the time when all quotations were supposed to be under that heading. The question is, I think, whether linking to Citations tab from the most common location of quotations nowadays (under senses, not in Quotations), seen e.g. in hydrogen (thanks -sche), does the job for you. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:43, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

   @Dan, quill (last verb sense) and hydrogen are examples. @This, "{{seeCites}}" is the name of the template that links to the citations pages (whether under a sense, as in the previous example, or under a Quotations header).
   Because policy already allows (encourages) quotations to be placed under relevant senses rather than separate headers, I've been moving quotations and "see Cites" links to put them under senses (and then deleting the empty quotations sections) for some time now, and AFAICT neither outcome in this vote will discourage that behaviour. - -sche (discuss) 16:21, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

   Note, I would support a vote that (a) incorporated proposal 1 of this vote, with the exception that where citations are present on the Citations page that belong to an unknown, unclassified or missing sense, the Quotations header is retained; and (b) mandated the placement of the "see Cites" links under a sense when at least one cite for that sense is present on the Citations page. This, that and the other (talk) 22:25, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

2. Oppose per TT&O. DCDuring TALK 19:37, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
3. Oppose per TT&O. Mostly concerning mobile support; I could care less about people who doesn't have JavaScript enabled. -Xbony2 (talk) 02:11, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
4. Oppose per above —Internoob 03:22, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
5. Oppose I find the Citations page too inconspicuous, and often I only notice the fact that there are citations when there's a quotations or similar section that calls attention to it, so I think it's useful to have this cross-reference. Benwing2 (talk) 04:50, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
6. Oppose — I would change my vote to one in support if the criteria for his support listed by This, that and the other in his post above (timestamped: 22:25, 15 March 2016) were incorporated into proposal 1. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:32, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
7. Oppose per This.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:30, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

1. Abstain I find it unhelpful both for editors and for readers that quotations/citations for a single entry can be placed more or less arbitrarily in three places (under particular definitions, in a Quotations section and on a Citations page), but I think this should be treated by a single proposal describing the whole mechanism of cutting this number to two places (or even just one), not by separate uncoordinated steps. (Personally I'd cancel the Citations namespace and move the contents from there under the definitions and into the Quotations section, making the latter collapsible, but this is just a personal notion, not a proposal.) --Droigheann (talk) 00:53, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

   The purpose of the citations namespace is to house quotations that are necessary for attestation but not helpful enough to readers to be included in the entry. Having quotations under particular definitions is helpful in illustrating the particular definitions, so putting them all in one place would make them less useful. --WikiTiki89 01:17, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

   @Droigheann I doubt that we can reduce the number of locations to one. The Citations space is useful for as a storehouse of citations that don't currently fit on the main page and sometimes just duplicate the citations on the main page.

   1. Some citations may be for definitions that we don't have, possibly because we don't have three of them or because the definition has failed or might fail RfD.
   2. Some citations, especially older ones and some literary ones, are highly ambiguous, sometimes by the intention of the author, sometimes because they are hard for contemporary users to assign to a definition.
   3. Some citations, may be in support of some grammatical point useful for sustaining a PoS header, or a usage note, or ....

   If I had to get rid of one location, it would be on the main page, where the best use of the Quotations header is to direct new and occasional users to the citations page by overcoming the "frame blindness" that may keep them from noticing the citations tab. Inevitably, though, if we keep the header, then quotations will accumulate under it. It seems that we would need a filter to prevent or maintenance to clean up such accumulation. DCDuring TALK 01:26, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

   Thanks to both of you, I didn't realise the namespace had a specific purpose different from illustrating the senses to the reader. As I said, it was just a notion (of which I'm disabused now). But I'm still unwilling to take a stance on this patchy vote about a complex matter. --Droigheann (talk) 02:04, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

• Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:46, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

1. Oppose It is easier to move citations from a header in principal namespace than from the citations namespace. This will probably further retard the process of moving quotations to the appropriate senses. What does this do except give some party the ability to do more automated cleanup? DCDuring TALK 19:45, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
2. Oppose These should be handled manually. --WikiTiki89 20:44, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
3. Oppose --Makaokalani (talk) 12:04, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
4. Oppose per Wikitiki89. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:50, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
5. Oppose -Xbony2 (talk) 02:11, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
6. Oppose —Internoob 03:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
7. Oppose Reason: Bandwagon. Also, as others said, there is a point in moving the quotations to the appropriate senses, rather than moving them all to the citations page. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:11, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
8. Oppose removal of information. (The proposal doesn't say the bot must add the info to the cites ns, only that it shall be moved, perhaps at some point in the distant future by the bot owner.) Plus what DCD said.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:30, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

1. Abstain I think this should be a purely manual task. After the citations are moved to the citations page, it's unlikely that anyone will ever get around to sorting them into senses. May as well leave them where they are, perhaps get a bot to come through and tag each quotation-containing "Quotations" section into a specific cleanup category, and then let humans do the work knowledgeably. This, that and the other (talk) 11:12, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

   Nothing prevents a human from easily finding these and no rule prevents the edits now. DCDuring TALK 19:41, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

2. Abstain. Quotations should be moved under senses: this is almost always possible, and current policy allows it (as I noted in the BP). There will be a minority of entries where a quotation uses e.g. three senses in the same sentence, but then, those quotations aren't great illustrations of any one sense, are they? So I don't mind moving them to the citations page. Likewise, there will be quotations where the sense is unclear, either absolutely or just to the person adding the quotation, but I don't mind those being moved to the citations page. But doing all this by hand or with AWB is not prohibitive and is perhaps better than doing it by bot, as DCDuring notes. - -sche (discuss) 19:33, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
3. Abstain as described under Proposal 1. --Droigheann (talk) 00:53, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

• Since the result of the 1st option is 8:4, at least two votes were closed as passed with the ratio at or below the 2/3 threshold, and at least one editor disputes the 2/3 threshold as too low, I propose to extend the vote to yield a more clear result. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:05, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Support extending. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 13:35, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Support extending. -Xbony2 (talk) 14:47, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
    • Vote extended by 1 month. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:58, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Proposal 1: no consensus (9-7-1) (56.25%-43.75%)

Proposal 2: utterly failed (0-8-3) (0%-100%)

Those proposals were about specific ways to remove the "Quotations" header from entries and will not be effected at this time. If both had passed, then there would be a greater chance of deprecating the "Quotations" header from entries altogether. In any event, as some people mentioned above, we may still want to move quotations and "seeCites" links into the appropriate senses sometimes.

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:38, 13 May 2016 (UTC)